Animal

Credit: Jack Jeffrey Photography New research suggests the Polynesians, Europeans and the Chinese have had a penchant for black pigs because of the novelty of their colour. Pigs have played an import..

This news release was issued on 28-Sept-2016 Many people are afraid of snakes, but scientists are now revealing insights about their venoms that could give even ophidiophobes an appreciation for the..

Credit: Sunny Jung/Virginia Tech To surprise their prey, some species of seabirds dive into the water at speeds greater than 50 miles per hour. A human diver entering the water that fast would likely..

Our gut microbiomes -- the varieties of microbes living in our digestive tracts -- may play a role in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Since dogs can also suffer from IBD, researchers at University of California San Diego School of…

An incredibly advanced hearing system which enables a group of insects to listen to the same sound twice with each ear, helping them to locate the sound's origin with pinpoint accuracy, has been discovered by scientists at the University of…

Wind turbines are known to kill large birds, such as golden eagles, that live nearby. Now there is evidence that birds from up to hundreds of miles away make up a significant portion of the raptors that are killed at these wind energy…

Biologists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have discovered that after bumblebees drink a small droplet of really sweet sugar water, they behave like they are in a positive emotion-like state.

Dying due to electrocution at the power lines is the most common death for Bonelli's eagle (Aquila fasciata), a threatened species in Europe. This is the case of a ringed bird in 2008 -- the baby bird 0M -- in Montserrat Mountain…

Humans and birds adapt their movement when running on uneven ground. "And even though their adaptation mechanisms and strategies developed completely independently, they do so in very similar ways," says Dr Roy Müller from the Friedrich…

The social ability of dogs is affected by genes that also seems to influence human behaviour, according to a new study from Linköping University in Sweden. The scientists have found a relationship between five different genes and the…

Instead of building a better mouse trap, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have built a better mouse cage. They've created a system called EnerCage (Energized Cage) for scientific experiments on awake, freely behaving small…

A common marine crustacean has shown researchers that it's all set to beat climate change - the males will get more attractive to the females, with a resulting population explosion.

With each swish of a tail, scientists now have a tool that could study the movements of fish throughout their entire lives.

In the animal kingdom colorful traits can be both a blessing and a curse. A new study from a group of researchers at Uppsala University has studied the conspicuous wing coloration of two species of damselflies. Their results imply that…

Africa's overall elephant population has seen the worst declines in 25 years, mainly due to poaching -- according to IUCN's African Elephant Status Report launched at the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES, taking place…

The fate of over 64,000 live wild animals officially reported to have been confiscated by enforcement agencies remains untraceable, according to a new report released by the University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU)…

In the 1980s, people living on houseboats in the San Francisco Bay were puzzled by a droning hum of unknown origin that started abruptly in the late evening and stopped suddenly in the morning.

Mosquitoes are more likely to feed on cattle than on humans if they carry a specific chromosomal rearrangement in their genome. This reduces their odds of transmitting the malaria parasite, according to a University of California,…

Pigeons can learn to distinguish real words from non-words by visually processing their letter combinations, surprising new research from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany shows.

From climate to the peninsula’s very shape, not much in Florida has stayed the same over the last 8 million years. Except, it turns out, alligators. While many of today’s top predators are more recent products of evolution, the…